The television producer and broadcasting executive John Whitney, who has died aged 92, was a pioneer of commercial radio and independent television drama in postwar Britain. His biggest hit as a producer was the period drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which ran for five years from 1971 on ITV, and was revived in 2010 by the BBC.
Then, as Capital Radio’s first managing director, from 1973, under Richard Attenborough as chair, he introduced the charity Help a London Child, the Flying Eye traffic congestion spotter and the popular Capital Radio Helpline. When he left the station in 1982, it was the most successful in the independent sector.
Yet these achievements were to be overshadowed when, later that year, he became director general of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). While this was usually a route to a knighthood, Whitney, shaped by the principles, social conscience and behaviour of his Quaker parents, took the role because he thought he could do some good.
The IBA chairman, Lord (George) Thomson of Monifieth, wanted to appoint someone who combined a strong commercial track record with Reithian instincts, and Whitney seemed to fit. A highly cultured man who stood out in his elegant, tailored suits, he installed art from his large private collection, including work by Henry Moore and Dalí, in his office at the headquarters on Brompton Road, Knightsbridge.
In his first years, the IBA nurtured the new Channel 4, which first aired in 1982, and solved an Equity advertising dispute. Whitney also backed the extension of independent production to ITV, opening up the medium to a new breed of ambitious producers that his previous career had anticipated.
So he was seen as no natural ally of the 15 ITV companies, which were widely seen as inefficient and dominated by unions, and had enjoyed a monopoly on television advertising, with an outdated 30-year system of allotting franchises that Whitney spoke out against in 1986.
The media sector in that decade, dominated as it was by Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and her ally Rupert Murdoch, was also marked by a range of conflicts over investigative journalism, programme standards, the impact of violent scenes and bad language on behaviour, and how to report on the IRA.
Cable and satellite operators were on the verge of transforming the TV market, and Murdoch, hungry to compete, found a way to get around a UK regulator by using a satellite transmission company based in Luxembourg for Sky. The European community favoured a new pan-European regulatory regime, Television Without Frontiers. Over the next seven years, until his resignation in 1989, Whitney increasingly became a victim of these circumstances.
At first, Thatcher directed her attention towards the BBC, freezing the licence fee. This was followed by the resignation of the BBC director general, Alasdair Milne, in January 1987. She then turned her gaze upon ITV. On 21 September of that year, Thatcher chaired what those attending recalled as a “terrifying” day-long broadcasting seminar at No 10.
Whitney was neither an accomplished speaker, nor a courtier, and his contribution fell flat. The prime minister’s irritation at his speech was clear to the room. “By the time he had finished, Whitney’s career in the public service, until then distinguished and honourable, lay in ruins,” was how another attendee described it. The seminar had only strengthened Thatcher’s resolve to ensure more choice and greater competition. Her observation that ITV was “the last bastion of restrictive practices” dominated the headlines afterwards.
The final blow came in 1988 with Death on the Rock, from Thames Television’s This Week current affairs team, which disclosed that three provisional IRA suspects shot dead by the SAS in a Gibraltar square had been unarmed, that there was no bomb in their parked car and they carried no device to set off a bomb.
The government tried twice to prevent the broadcast but Thomson viewed the programme and cleared it for broadcast. The second attempt to block it was on the day of transmission, but the IBA took legal advice and the broadcast went ahead at 9pm.
An independent inquiry subsequently took the view that the programme was trenchant and proved “freedom of expression can prevail”. Thatcher refused to accept this. Thames later lost its franchise as a result of the 1990 Broadcasting Act and the IBA was abolished. Whitney resigned two years before his contract ended, in 1989.
For years senior ITV executives blamed Whitney for the misfortunes visited on them by Thatcher, rather than considering their own rebellious stance. Whitney at some point calmly accepted his fate. “There goes my knighthood,” he joked to his family. He was the only director general of the IBA not to receive one.
The son of Willis Whitney, a scientist, and Dorothy (nee Robertson), John was brought up in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, and educated at the Quaker-founded Leighton Park school in Reading. After leaving he began a business recording special social events such as weddings, then, aged 21, formed Ross Radio Productions, making programmes mostly for overseas companies including Radio Luxembourg. The firm also purchased the UK rights to the Autocue prompting company, and turned it into a popular, profitable aid for presenters.
In the 1960s, Whitney was a co-founder of the Local Radio Association, whose lobbying influenced parliament’s decision to extend licences to independent (commercial) radio franchises.
As the co-founder with John Hawkesworth of Sagitta Productions (1968-82), Whitney devised numerous TV series including Upstairs, Downstairs and Danger UXB (1979), a fictional drama about a bomb disposal unit inspired by his experiences as a boy in 1940, when he developed a sideline locating unexploded German bombs for the police for sixpence a time.
Following his departure from the IBA, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company snapped him up as director in 1989. In 1995 he moved on to chair a radio investment and management company. He never publicly expressed any bitterness and busied himself with a range of charitable, industry and arts appointments, which included being chair of Rada and a governor of the English National Ballet.
He was appointed CBE in 2008. In 2013 he published a memoir, To Serve the People, the title taken from the motto of the IBA. His hobbies were chess, photography and sculpture.
In 1956 he married Roma Hodgson, a ballet dancer. She survives him, along with their son, Alexander, daughter, Fiona, and three grandchildren.
• John Norton Braithwaite Whitney, producer and broadcasting executive, born 20 December 1930; died 4 November 2023
